Policy & Regulation

Privacy Rules to Change in the EU, But What If ...?

In a presentation EU Commissioner Viviane Reding gave a preview of the new Privacy regulation her DG is preparing. As she states, privacy rules need to be brought up to date and harmonized. With all 27 member states having the same rules and tools to enforce, a company only will deal with one privacy commissioner... So, what if we, for the sake of this blog, take this initiative towards spam and cyber crime. What would this do to spam enforcement? more

Google and Verizon Wireless Find Common Ground on Net Neutrality

In a joint statement released today by Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, and Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless, the two companies have expressed their support for making existing 'net neutrality' principles enforceable. The joint statement was published as a blog post late Wednesday on both Google and Verizon policy blogs. more

Trying to Predict Miguel Diaz-Canel’s Internet Policy

I recently gave a short talk that concluded with some speculation on the attitude of Miguel Diaz-Canel, who is expected to replace Raúl Castro next year, toward the Internet. I searched online and came up with three clues -- two talks he has given and one act. In May 2013, Diaz-Canel gave a speech at an educator's conference in which he anticipated today's preoccupation with fake news. He acknowledged the futility of trying to control information. more

AT&T CEO Publishes Open Letter Calling on Congress to Establish an “Internet Bill of Rights”

Randall Stephenson, AT&T Chairman and CEO, published an open letter today urging Congress to "end the debate once and for all, by writing new laws that govern the internet and protect consumers." more

Neustar Urges Caution to ICANN Before Batching

Neustar has sent the following letter to ICANN. Neustar sent the letter to urge caution to ICANN before launching the batching process to promote competition and choice for consumers in a fair and balanced manner... "Neustar has long been an advocate for the introduction of new generic top level domains. Given the long and sometimes arduous road the ICANN community has traveled to get to this point in the process, we are understandably anxious to avoid unnecessary delay in the launch of new gTLDS." more

“One Google, One World; One China, No Google”

China's insomniac twitterati were on fire this afternoon U.S. time, powered no doubt by much caffeine and sugar in the the wee hours of the morning in China. Half an hour before Google's David Drummond posted his announcement that Google.cn is now effectively operating from Google.com.hk, Guangzhou-based open source programmer @LEMONed broke the
news that google.cn was being redirected to the Hong Kong service. Reacting to the news, @wentommy quipped: "One Google, One World; One China, No Google." more

Can Plural and Singular New gTLDs Both Be Successful?

Now that ICANN has stuck to its guns and only placed 4 new gTLD's strings that look confusingly similar into contention sets, rather than those that sound identical, such as .inc and .ink or those that have the same meaning like .Law and .Lawyer or those that are singular and plurals of the same word, like .deal and .deals, we now that many new gTLD's are going to have a very a tough marketing road and face a lot of consumer confusion. more

Open Networks Delivering the Goods for All

The City of Amsterdam announcement to now move to the next stage of their FttH (fibre to the home) project -- with another roll out covering 100,000 connections -- is a clear indication that the concept of open access FttH networks is a valid one. This will have large scale implications for countries around the world who are looking at using open network based telecoms infrastructure projects to stimulate their economies. more

History is Written and Revised by the Winners - Can the Internet Archive Change That?

I was naively optimistic in the early days of the Internet, assuming that it would enhance democracy while providing "big data" for historians. My first taste of that came during the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 when I worked with colleagues to create an archive of the network traffic in, out and within the Soviet Union. That traffic flowed through a computer called "Kremvax," operated by RELCOM, a Russian software company. The content of that archive was not generated by the government or the establishment media -- it was citizen journalism... more

German High Court Says No to Retaining Telecom, Email Data for Tracking Criminal Networks

The highest court in Germany has ruled against telephone and email data retention used to track criminal networks. Melissa Eddy of the Global and Mail reports: "A law ordering data on calls made from mobile or landline telephones and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled. In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security."
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Cyber Security and the White House

A few months ago, an article appeared on arstechnica.com asking the question "Should cybersecurity be managed from the White House?" During the recent presidential elections in the United States and the federal elections in Canada, the two major players in both parties had differing views that crossed borders. In the US, the McCain campaign tended to favor free market solutions to the problem of cybersecurity, and the Conservatives in Canada took a similar position... more

White Spaces News… Interesting First Step

When the U.S. Digital Television Transition (DTV) transition happens in Feb. 2009, channels 2 through 51 will remain allocated for television transmission. Few of the nation's television markets actually use 49 channels. Indeed, most use less than half of that number... Today, with Congress in recess, leaving less room for last-minute-Lucy-with-the-football lobbying gambits, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appears to be poised to release a report saying the white spaces can be used without necessarily causing interference to existing broadcasts. There are still many questions to be answered... more

5G Frequency Fees Are Waived in Singapore to Help Drive Market Tests

Singapore government has waived telecom frequency fees for 5G trials until December 2019 in order to catalyze market growth and discovery of potential use cases. more

Obama’s Tech Stimulus Plan: Health IT, Broadband, and Smart Grid

Steve Lohr has a nice piece in the New York Times ('Technology Gets a Piece of Stimulus,' 26 Jan 2009, p. C1) this morning about the role that technology and innovation will play in the economic recovery (aka stimulus) bill supported by the Obama Administration. In the past, health IT deployment has been approached as an engineering problem: what computers have to be part of which networks exchanging which types of data? This loses sight of the purpose of electronic medical records... more

Net Neutrality: Both Sides Make Some Ridiculous Claims

We've all heard too much about NN, which I've been reporting for 20 years. I support it because I don't want Randall Stephenson of AT&T deciding what I should watch on TV. The long-run effect is negative. The claims from some people who agree with me are ridiculous. "According to former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, ending net neutrality will end the Internet as we know it." Michael knows I respect him, but... more